India’s crime-fighting agency searched three premises of edtech giant Byju’s and its founder Byju Raveendran, it stated Saturday, and seized varied “incriminating” paperwork and digital information.
The Enforcement Directorate stated it performed the searches under the provisions of the nation’s anti-money laundering legislation FEMA, however declined to elaborate. The agency has performed a number of comparable probes in current months, together with at crypto companies WazirX and CoinSwitch Kuber, phonemaker Vivo and information broadcaster the BBC.
The agency stated “various” complaints from non-public people prompted the investigation. As a part of the probe into Byju’s, which is ongoing, ED stated it summoned Raveendran “several” occasions however the founder “remained evasive and never appeared during the investigation.”
The probe has to this point discovered that Byju’s raised about $3.4 billion in overseas direct funding in the course of the interval of 2011 to 2023. During this era, the startup remitted about $1.1 billion to overseas entities and labeled about $115 million as commercial and advertising expense.
It seems that a part of what prompted ED to conduct the investigation was the delayed submitting of annual financials by Byju’s. The so-called findings — how a lot cash Byju’s raised, and later invested in abroad models — have been broadly disclosed by Byju’s and reported by media earlier.
“The company has not prepared its financial statements since financial year 2020-21 and has not got the accounts, audited which is mandatory. Hence, the genuineness of the figures provided by the company are being cross examined from the banks,” ED stated in an announcement Sunday.
The Bengaluru-headquartered Byju’s, which is India’s most valuable startup and which counts BlackRock, Sequoia India, Lightspeed Venture Partners India, UBS amongst its backers, termed the searches by the agency as “a routine inquiry,” and stated the startup maintains full transparency with the authorities and has offered all the knowledge that was requested.
“We have nothing but the utmost confidence in the integrity of our operations, and we are committed to upholding the highest standards of compliance and ethics. We will continue to work closely with the authorities to ensure that they have all the information they need, and we are confident that this matter will be resolved in a timely and satisfactory manner. We want to emphasize that it is business as usual at Byju’s,” a spokesperson of Byju’s authorized crew stated in an announcement.
“We are committed to delivering high-quality educational products and services to our customers across India and the world.”
ED’s assertion comes at a time when Byju’s is closing a big funding spherical and is gearing up for the IPO of its subsidiary unit physical tutor chain Aakash.
